Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or...

This paper studies the legacies of wartime institutions, measured as rebelocracy, on the ability of households to cope with negative income shocks. Rebelocracy is the social order established by non-state armed actors in the communities they control. By providing public goods and a predictable...

This paper studies how an increase in the number of armed groups operating within an area affects the amount of organized political violence. We use plausible exogenous variation in the number of armed groups in Pakistan, by exploiting the split of a major group due to the natural death of its...

In conflict zones around the world, both state and non-state actors deliver governance at local levels. This paper explores the long-term impact of individual exposure to 'wartime governance' on social and political behaviour. We operationalize wartime governance as the local policy choices and...

The Sahel and the Sahara are faced with exceptional political instability involving a combination of rebellions, jihadist insurgencies, coups d’état, protest movements and illegal trafficking. The backdrop to this accumulated violence is a globalised security environment, which blurs the...

We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...

We show that the exposure to war-related violence increases the quantity of children temporarily, with permanent negative consequences for the quality of the current and previous cohort of children. Our empirical evidence is based on Nepal, which experienced a ten year long civil conflict of...

We show that the exposure to war-related violence increases the quantity of children temporarily, with permanent negative consequences for the quality of the current and previous cohorts. Our empirical evidence is based on Nepal, which experienced a ten year long civil conflict of varying...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...